Aravind Adiga wins Man Booker Prize for Fiction

Aravind Adiga has won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008 for his debut novel The White Tiger.

The 33-year old became only the third novelist to win the award on his debut. DBC Pierre had won the award in 2003 for hi debut novel Vernon God Little and Arundhati Roy had won in 1997 for her debut novel The God of Small Things.

Adiga becomes the fifth Indian author to win the prize, joining VS Naipaul in 1971, Salman Rushdie in 1981, Arundhati Roy in 1997 and Kiran Desai in 2006 respectively.

"The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour," said Michael Portillo, a judge on the panel.

"The White Tiger presented a different aspect of India and was a novel with enormous literary merit," Portillo said.